By the time I reached junior high, which covered grades 7-9 in New York in the 50s, my sister was in the homestretch of her high school years. Both of us had been placed in special classes in junior high, known in her day as RA (rapid advancement) and in mine as SP (special progress) which maintained and intensified the earlier ability grouping. These programs enabled us to skip our eighth-grade...
P.S. 189, the school I attended from kindergarten through sixth grade, was a block and a half from my apartment in Brooklyn, two safe street crossings, to be exact. One of them was overseen by members of the School Safety Patrol, replete with silver badges and yellow straps slung rakishly across their bodies like Pancho Villa’s bandoleros. When the light showed red, the guards at each crossing...
In the early 90s, the Dalai Lama invited a delegation of rabbis from various denominations and other Jewish intellectuals to visit him in India. He and his followers had been driven from Tibet into exile by the Chinese Communist government and were struggling with questions of how a people can survive being uprooted from their homeland. This was a subject that Jews knew something about; they had...
I was brought to tears a few minutes ago watching a video that a friend posted on Facebook. The entire faculty at his school had sent to the entire student body photos of themselves sheltering at home while they tried to maintain some continuity of instruction and community they had so painstakingly...
Note: Ayanna (not her real name) has been part of my life for more than 20 years, ever since she entered my seventh grade classroom. She’s now a neighbor and friend. We get together for lunch regularly. She has given me permission to share her story to illustrate the central role a caring school and caring teachers can play in students’ lives, particularly in times of crisis. I am...